Vaughn Palmer: Time may be right for a third party, or even a fourth, in the B.C. legislature

Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun columnist04.29.2013

‘I should inform all members of the legislature that I had a meeting with my caucus this morning and they are absolutely united behind me,” Graham Lea said in his first speech in the house as a one-MLA party.

VICTORIA - When former MLA Graham Lea passed away earlier this month, the death notices cited his dozen years representing Prince Rupert and his two-year stint as minister of highways in the first New Democratic Party government.

Lea, 79 when he died on April 3, had also worked as a senior manager with the Truck Loggers Association, a broadcaster with the CBC, a smelter worker and a mechanic with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“Graham lived life to the fullest,” as his family put it and as anyone who knew him would attest. “He was renowned for his quick wit, intellectual curiosity, love for debate and side-splitting humour.”

Politicos of a certain age still recall his tongue-in-cheek response to an unctuous party worker who urged the rookie MLA to pay more attention to his constituents. “Constituents?” Lea replied. “Have you ever seen one of them up close? Ugly! Beady little eyes.”

Pretty much forgotten amid the fond memories was an episode that is germane to the current provincial election: Lea’s quixotic attempt to establish what many British Columbia voters say they want, namely an alternative to the political parties of left and right.

Lea sought the leadership of the New Democratic Party in 1984, pitching the need for the party to update its economic views beyond the traditional left/right polarization. Not a message that party stalwarts much wanted to hear, witness that he finished sixth in field of six.

So he bolted the NDP and set himself up as a one-MLA party, armoured only by that famous wit. “I should inform all members of the legislature that I had a meeting with my caucus this morning and they are absolutely united behind me,” he announced to gales of laughter in his first turn in the house.

The laughter soon faded on the NDP side, as his former friends treated him like a heretic. “He betrayed his own city … A soap producer … The most extensive notes that member has ever had were a couple of blank pages on his desk.”

He fired back with a set piece about a conversation supposedly overheard at the back of an NDP rally. “One guy says, ‘you know I haven’t had a new idea in 20 years.’ The guy next to him comes back with, ‘that’s nothing. I haven’t had a new idea in 30 years.’”

Away from the legislative arena, Lea set himself up with an office, a modest staff, a board of advisers, an emerging set of policies and a brand — the United Party of B.C.

He pitched it as an alternative to the politics of us versus them, one party saying “we’re for free enterprise and you’re not,” he other one saying “Oh yeah? Well we like people and you don’t.”

Those characterizations are from a speech that Lea delivered in the legislature in March 1985. Readers may be struck at how little the respective messaging from the two major parties has evolved in the ensuing 28 years.

For all of Lea’s good humour and effort, the effort proved to be futile. After the United Party failed to gain any traction, he switched in early 1986 to the Conservatives, then led by former Victoria mayor Peter Pollen.

Then came Bill Vander Zalm’s winning of the Social Credit Party leadership and the you-had-to-be-there late summer and early fall of 1986 in B.C. politics.

Unable to compete with Vander-mania — for a brief moment in time, nothing could — Lea and Pollen shelved any political aspirations of their own and retreated from the field.

Lea went on to help found the ex-MLAs association, a worthy organization that, if the polls can be credited, is poised for a major gain in its ranks post-May 14.

Looking to that event, one has to note how Lea’s effort to establish a third political force is a well-established arc in provincial history.

Not so much a “rise and fall” as an initial flurry of attention, a modest bump upwards, then a trip down the memory hole from whence one is never to emerge.

Voters often say they want an alternative to polarization and I expect they mean it.

But as election day approaches and the stakes increase, voters are driven into one camp or the other: The New Democrats and whatever the major Not-the-NDP party is calling itself these days.

This year could be different. Recent opinion polls suggest that between a fifth and a quarter of all voters are considering a party other than the NDP and the Liberals, meaning the Greens and the Conservatives.

If those inclinations are borne out, and if the votes are sufficiently concentrated in selected ridings, then both parties could elect MLAs on May 14.

Several would-be independent MLAs could benefit from the “none of the above” sentiment as well, though it is even harder for non-affiliated candidates to get attention in the usual focus on parties and leaders.

Three or four parties with representatives in the legislature, leavened by the presence of an independent or two? It would give free rein to a greater diversity of views for a time.

But I’m also compelled to note what happened when the voters elected representatives of multiple parties in the 1970s and again in 1990. Eventually the forces that suffocated Graham Lea’s third force reasserted themselves, and B.C. returned to two-party polarization once again.

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Vaughn Palmer: Time may be right for a third party, or even a fourth, in the B.C. legislature

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